The Fly Boys (48 page)

“Okay,” she said briskly. “First of all, you need to drop your formality. You should be on a first-name basis with your staff.
You should have been on a first-name basis since day one.”

“Really…” Harrison hesitated. “Susan?”

She laughed. “Yes,
Don
.” She shook her head. “Were you like this at A-L?”

“No,” he admitted, “but things were different there. It was smaller, and I’d been there for ages. Worked my way up, if you
know what I mean.”

“Sure, I do,” she shrugged. “At A-L you earned everyone’s respect, but it’s tougher here. My—” she paused, remembering that
with Teddy gone, nobody in the department knew that she was Herman Gold’s daughter. “I mean,
our
boss, Mr. Gold, has made you chief engineer, and a lot of people around here are a little resentful of that fact.”

“I know
that much
Susan, but what should I do about it?” he demanded. “Besides calling people by their first names, I mean?”

“Well,” she said, and paused thoughtfully. “I think you should ask for their help.”

“Huh?” he asked, puzzled. “But I don’t need any help.”

She shook her head, sighing. “That’s
precisely
why you should ask for some. People don’t feel threatened by someone who asks them for help.”

“I bet Teddy never asked for help,” he muttered.

“He didn’t have to,” she said. “But he hired all of these people. Also, you’ve got to take into account the age factor. Teddy
was much older than you. He was sort of—” She paused. “Avuncular.”

“A father figure, you mean?”

She nodded. “People felt comforted by his presence. But now he’s gone and here you are, threatening the hierarchy like some
upstart young bull.”

Harrison burst out laughing. “I don’t think
any woman
has ever referred to me as
a bull
before.”

Susan blushed, and his heartbeat quickened further still. He began to wonder if he could ask her out.

“You know what I meant,” she said softly.

Harrison nodded. “How’d you get to be so smart?”

Susan grinned wryly. “Life, I guess.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You’re a widow, aren’t you? You lost your husband in the war?”

Susan nodded. “That’s not what I was referring to, but yes, since you brought it up. It is true that I’m a widow. I have a
son.”

“Oh, really?” Harrison replied. “How old?”

“He’s ten.”

“Oh….” He sensed an awkward silence rising between them, as was always the case sooner or later when it came to women.

“Well!” Susan said crisply, gathering up her notebooks and folders. “I’ve got work to do.”

“So you really think I should ask the others for help?” Harrison began quickly, unwilling to let their conversation end. “To
get them to like me, I mean,” he prodded.

“Yes,” she smiled. “It doesn’t matter if you really need help. Ask for it anyway, and act impressed with its quality when
it’s given to you. Then, while you’re chatting, why not suggest getting together for lunch?”

“Try that with all the senior people, is that the idea?”

“Sure!” she enthused. “Before you know it, you’ll be wondering what all today’s fuss was about.”

“You really think so? That I can win them over, I mean?”

“Why not?” she laughed. “Why ever couldn’t you?”

“I’ve never been very good with people.”

“Well, I think you’re a very nice guy,” she told him.

“Really—in that case would you like to have dinner with me?” he blurted out abruptly.

His heart sank as she began to laugh.
She thought I was joking
.

She must have read his reaction in his expression. “Oh, Don… I’m sorry. You were serious? I thought you were… Oh, never mind,”
she trailed off, shaking her head. “The point is that you don’t have to take me out to persuade me to like you. I already
do!”

“Yes, of course,” he muttered, pretending to be busy shuffling the folders in front of him.
Never should have asked her
, he thought.
Never, never should have
.

“Well, I’ll get started on that memo to the PR department,” she said, getting up.

“Yes, thank you.” He watched her leave the room, feeling like a total ass for asking her out. He should have known better;
known that he was being too forward.
Damn, damn, damn
. Now he was going to feel uncomfortable with her for who knew how long?

He decided to wait a few minutes before leaving. Give her a head start so that he wouldn’t have to try to come up with conversation
while they were walking back to their desks.

He was just trying to be nice to me, wasn’t he?
Susan wondered.
He wasn’t really asking me out to dinner, was he?

She was back at her desk. She’d been preparing to type up that memo when she’d paused.

Had
he asked her out intending to be polite, or was he really interested?

It had been so long since she’d been out with a man that his invitation had shocked her. She’d automatically said no without
really considering the idea, assuming it was just his way of being cordial, but then again, if he’d only wanted to be cordial,
he would have invited her to lunch, not dinner.

She pushed away from her typewriter. She needed to think about this.

He was cute in his way. Certainly not classically handsome, as her husband, Blaize, had been, but certainly attractive with
his broad shoulders and pretty hazel eyes.

She watched him come out of the conference room at the far end of the department and walk toward her on his way to his office.
He was very
definitely
going bald, she thought. The overhead light fixtures were reflecting off his high forehead.

So what if he’s going bald?
she scolded herself angrily. She wasn’t perfect. She was almost thirty-one years old, for God’s sake, and starting to show
a few signs of wear and tear of her own.

Yes, she thought, Don Harrison had a lot going for him. He had a sweet grin and a good laugh. He’d seemed not the least put
off the way some men were when she brought up the fact that she had a son. And Don was clearly brilliant, and he was most
certainly a gentleman.

And she’d
enjoyed
talking to him. That was the most important thing. For the first time in a long time, she’d made small talk with a man and
if had been
fun
, not a
chore
. She wouldn’t mind talking to him some more.

He kept his eyes averted as he passed by her desk.

“Don?” she heard herself murmur.

He paused in his office doorway. He looked distraught. “Yes?”

“Do you…?” She hesitated. “Do you like Italian food? There’s a place in Santa Monica I used to go to quite a lot. I could
meet you there for a bite some evening.”

“Why not tonight?” he asked.

She took a deep breath.
It’s been so long. Am I really ready to try again?
“Why not?” she agreed lightly.

Steve was flying at 47,000 feet: operational ceiling for the BroadSword. He had his wing tanks in place, and was throttled
down for maximum conservation of fuel.

At this altitude the sky was an endless, crystalline blue. The earth below looked like a crinkled expanse of chocolate furred
with green mold. Off to the south,
very far south
, was a thin, tangled quicksilver cord: the Yalu River.

Where all good BroadSword pilots are supposed to be
, Steve idly thought as he checked his instruments and maps to ascertain his position and heading. Somewhere to his east was
Bao Kung Cheng Airfield, the commie base where the MiG drivers were trained for combat. Somewhere to his south, on the safe
side of the Yalu, was the rest of Steel Fist Flight.

“Back Door, come in,” Larsen called. “Come in, Back Door.”

“This is Black Door,” Steve replied.

“We’ve got a double flight of MiGs orbiting the river.”

Steve’s heartbeat quickened. “That’s got to be blue-balls?”

“Now don’t be getting antsy,” Larsen responded. “We’ll check it out and let you know. We’ve got to be sure that this isn’t
a false alarm before you shoot your wad.”

“Affirmative,” Steve said.

“Fist Lead, out,” Larsen replied.

Nothing to do now but wait
, Steve thought.

It had been an anxious couple of months since his reunion last August with Yalu Charlie. Since then Steve had obsessed on
his scheme to bring down the Russian. Nothing else mattered to him: not becoming a jet ace, and not his big fight and the
ensuing break-off with Linda Forrest.

He’d downed that fifth MiG back in September, but it had seemed like small potatoes. As far as Steve was concerned, he could
single-handedly bring down the entire Red air force, but he still wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d had the blue lightning
MiG in his gun sight.

The fight with Linda had also taken place in September, oddly enough. She’d come to Chusan Airfield along with a contingent
of newspeople on a tour of the front. Steve had bribed an airman a couple of bucks to get the key to an out-of-the-way storeroom
in Operations Center so they could have themselves a good time in it for a couple of nights, but then Linda had gotten all
mushy, starting in about how she loved him and how maybe they should be thinking about marriage.

In hindsight, Steve guessed that with his mind on Yalu Charlie’s imminent reappearance, he’d been a mite too emphatic about
how marriage wasn’t in the cards for him right now, and not likely in the future.

Well, telling her that had sure as hell been a mistake, because for the rest of the visit she had been as cold to him as the
air temperature at fifty thousand feet, and letting that storeroom go to waste had been a damn shame because the sex between
them had always been outstanding.

She and the rest of the contingent of news hounds had left a couple of days later, and that had been the last Steve had seen
or heard from her.

Oh, yeah. The last except for that card, postmarked Japan. On it was a brief, scrawled message:

You want to be JUST FRIENDS? That’s fine with me. But that’s ALL we’re going to be from now on. Get it? (NOT ANYMORE YOU AREN’T!!!)
YOUR
PAL
,
L

Yeah, Steve had gotten the message, all right. It was too bad. Linda had been the only woman friend that he’d ever had. In
hindsight he guessed that the question of marriage inevitably had to come along sooner or later to louse things up.

A couple of weeks after that, Steve had traded a couple of fifths of booze to a file clerk assigned to base Operations Center
in return for the opportunity to scan the reports the flight leaders filed after each CAP. The first mention of Yalu Charlie
sightings had appeared in yesterday’s reports.

Today Steve had initiated “Operation Back Door.”

It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best that Steve could come up with. The first part of it called for Steel Fist Flight
to keep mum concerning the fact that Steve wasn’t with them. This was for the benefit of any GCI operators who might me monitoring
their chatter. Of course, Steve wasn’t showing up on GCI’s screens, but he was hoping that the busy radar jockeys wouldn’t
notice.

Meanwhile, Steve was flying above forbidden Chinese territory at maximum ceiling to conserve fuel. If commie radar picked
him, Steve hoped that they would figure that he was one of their own, maybe with radio trouble, which would explain why he
wasn’t answering their calls. Along that line of wishful thinking, Steve was hoping that the GCI radar jockeys surveying enemy
air space would also assume from his position and altitude that he was a MiG.

Steve glanced at the clock in the upper right-hand corner of the BroadSword’s instrument panel. Larsen was certainly taking
his time calling back.

It’s got to be Charlie
, Steve thought. /
feel it. Come on, Charlie. It’s today, or maybe tomorrow
.

Or never
….

He knew that he could only pull a jury-rigged dodge like this once or twice before it fell apart and he was caught and hung
out to dry for disobeying orders not to cross the Yalu…

“Back Door, Back Door, come in.” It was Larsen, and from his excited tone Steve knew what he was going to say before he said
it.

“Back Door here,” Steve said, already bringing his BroadSword around toward Bao Kung Cheng field before he’d even heard Larsen
say:

“You’re a go, Back Door. Repeat,
you are a go
.”

It was the prearranged signal that meant that the Yalu had been sighted, and that he and his flock of fledgling pilots were
on their way home to Bao Kung Cheng.

“Affirmative. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me,” Larsen said dryly. “It’s your funeral.”

“Back Door out,” Steve said, smiling as he remembered what Larsen had said to him this morning on the ready line:

“
I’m not worried about you getting past Bao Kung Cheng’s guns or beating Charlie. I’m worried that you won’t survive the drubbing
our own side is going to give you when you get home
.”

Steve guessed that he was breaking just about every rule in the book this time around. Back in November 1950, the Air Force
had briefly entertained the idea of allowing its pilots the right of hot pursuit across the Yalu, but the outcry from America’s
allies in Korea had forced the brass to drop the idea.

And all that ruckus had only been over the issue of hot pursuit: a few moments’ flying time over Manchuria while in the heat
of a dogfight. What the hell was the UN going to say when it found out a USAF pilot had intentionally invaded Chinese airspace
for an extended time period in order to carry out a premeditated, illegal attack on a Soviet pilot?

The second half of the plan was as cunningly simple (or foolishly naive; take your pick) as the first part. The idea was to
intercept Charlie as he was coming in for a landing at his home airfield.